Church bells

I am, honestly, sorry to anyone who's been faithfully checking this silly blog in the hopes I've written something new. My supervisors have said the U word - "upgrade" - and so I'm working full tilt on proving myself a viable academic.

But tonight I'm sitting up in the departmental work room, and I can see the west face of the Minster all lit up through the window. A few minutes ago, the bells tolled the hours.

England is a frustrating, silly place sometimes. But I love it here and when I leave, I'll miss the church bells.


P.S. No luck at SSHRC this year.

• SSHRC is on the move.
  
• The article Greg and I were writing on deafness has been pushed back because the scope of it got too big for us to give it an adequate treatment in the time allotted. But we're going to keep at it.
  
• I have to remember my other funding options.
  

I'm going to post a "Latin Tutor Available" sign in my house. There's a lot of beginners here this year, and I may as well see if I can come to an arrangement. Money is acceptable, but so is food or even trade in kind (any Anglo-Normanists out there?). I also really need to remember to submit my application to teach in the winter term.

As for research, I'm working with chronicles right now, and while I find them interesting, they're not particularly rich in the material I need. One reference here or there. Mostly they're more interested in calling opponents sinners and heretics rather than fools. But I do have two references so far, so maybe I will find more.

I'm not sure how I'm going to pull all this together. I've got my pastoral manuals and a heck of a lot of court cases, a couple chronical refs now, Margery, and Piers Plowman. Somehow this will all pull together into a single coherent thesis? I guess SSHRC is good practice for this.

Meanwhile, I really wish I had time to stop and do some secondary reading. There's a lot going around in the background that I need to sort out. I need to revisit my conceptual books. Time is such a fleeting thing. Perhaps I will beg an indulgence of my supervisors next meeting.

Some days you win

Today has been one of those days. The mountain of work aside, I have made three big discoveries today. Two of them basically prove that the high medieval summae confessorum I've been wanting to examine were, in fact, circulating in late medieval England. They were being traded/donated/sold, and William Langland quoted them in his famous Piers Ploughman. Proof enough? Literary enough?

And the other I can't share yet but I saw my first book (someday...) take shape in front of me.

It's been a good day.

I even got a paragraph of SSHRC written.

Taking off at a run

Have you ever looked at the CV of an established professor and wondered how the heck they manage to accumulate so many speaking and publishing credits?

I'm learning. It's not about being particularly competent. It's about the nature of deadlines and the human condition.

May seems awfully far away right now. It's months and months away! So I fool myself into thinking that's loads of time to prepare a full 20 minute paper and a 10 minute roundtable talk. If by this point you are laughing hysterically, then you know what I mean.

Likewise with the book review I agreed to do in May. And the article I committed to in July. And now it's September, and the reason you don't hear from me much is my frantic scramble to make good on all my promises. It'll happen again in May, I'm sure.

And now, I'm off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of... well, he's not a wizard and he's not particularly special and he's been dead centuries but he wrote some cool stuff about deafness that I'll get back to you on.

An Assortment of Odds and Ends

I think there's something of a shit-disturber in me. It's just a polite shit-disturber. I love the thought of publishing something that could get people all in a tizzy. I simply adore the fact that people have built a tenuous house of cards to house the history of disability in the Middle Ages, and we are taking it gingerly apart, card by card. Eventually someone will give a lecture or publish a paper and the whole thing will come tumbling down. And people will be aghast at what we've done.

Then - then - we can start building a new house in earnest. Those of us in the little niche understand each other, but until we can definitively enact a paradigm shift we will just be that group of weirdos in the corner.

We'll know the house is tumbling when people outside the community start getting disturbed by what we write. We'll know the cards are all on the floor when people stop asking us "Why bother?"

But I think that's enough of that particular metaphor. I just love the challenge. I love seeing it happen, helping make it happen.

The library at York has been helpful with this, especially the Minster Old Library (pre-1800 books). I'm surprised anew each time I go looking for an obscure fifteenth century text and it pops up in the catalogue system. I just wish I could get some photocopies or even digital pics. But the spines are sometimes delicate and the photos mean licencing issues, so I look forward to many days of transcribing. (One of my current projects has 11 folios dedicated to the topic! ELEVEN!)

In unrelated news, I booked my Christmas flights today. I found a very good price and good dates, and you just can't beat that!

WOOHOO

Today: good supervision! Very good!

I made good points, I had LOTS of material. More than they expected, it seems (thank you!).

Also, I had a brainwave regarding the records, hospitals, care, and silence. I'm going to London today for a couple days, so remind me to share when I get back, Greg. Also, I was informed that there's an MA student here doing a thesis on idiots in the Patent Rolls. It's like pulling teeth, sometimes.

Have a good couple days!

What's Been Happening

In short form, "artistic differences" with my advisors. A large part of this is due to my own stubbornness, I admit. I have such a disinterest in the literary facet of things that is York's speciality (if you like Chaucer, this is a good place for you) that the dual-discipline gig here is rough on me. And yet, I don't really have the training for archaeology or art history, either. And I'm not "trained as a historian," so single-discipline is out.

However, it does appear that we have reached a compromise. I have been digging through a mountain of legal records for the past while (a workload drastically reduced by the kindness of my Colleague). I've also been doing a bit of reading into jurisdiction disputes - the Church and the State were constantly squabbling over who had jurisdiction.* The question of wills and testamentaries is an odd one - they appear in both sets of records. But I digress.

My attendance at the Leeds IMC was not unprofitable, as I scored a copy of The Sign Languages of Poverty and a CD-ROM version of The Parliament Rolls of England (fully searchable in BOTH official languages**), as well as attending a certain reception, wherein I found a reference to senile priests in a display volume and got to chat with a some very nice and informative people. Also, the coffee service is better at Leeds than Kalamazoo.

My digital camera has become my new research tool in the world of non-lending libraries. Naturally, I do not subject rare and delicate books to the camera, but for hardy year-2000 hardcovers? No guilt. It's cheaper than photocopying, if you have a decent hand.

I look up at my bookshelf, and I begin to understand where the professors get the huge shelves and shelves of books that fill their offices. Slow, gradual accumulation. It's neat, too. I am developing a rather good library of the history of foolishness and insanity.*** It's neat. I'm becoming my own library.

Oh, other good news! The Disease, Disability, and Medicine in the Middle Ages conference was a winner! It was simply fantastic. There were so many perspectives and subjects! I can't believe that anyone could ever say "Oh, there's nothing to say there." There is SUCH a glut of things to talk about in the field. The paper that was the most valuable in terms of my own research was "Bones of Contention: Some issues surrounding the use of human remains in the study of disease and disability," presented by postgrads L. Craig and K. Hemer. It reminded me (Oh how did I manage to forget??) that burial is a religious practice. Also, it was an excellent example of palaeopathology put to good use. P. Mitchell's paper, "Gastrointestinal Disease in the Crusades," made me glad all over again that I've gone vegetarian. Nothing spoils my appetite for meat like the thought of intestinal parasites. T. Jones' paper on distant-travel warefare and the limitations unfamiliar water and climate would have imposed on armies was extremely interesting. Really, all the papers that were presented were great.

I also connected with some great people. I got to meet Irina Metzler, who is GREAT conversation, and fun as well as brilliant. The grad student population was well represented, and it seems there may be another medieval disability PhD at York in the relatively near future (WOOT). I had coffee with a fascinating scholar from Oxford (he also taught in Canada!) after the conference officially ended. All in all, it could scarcely have been a cooler conference.

Plus, I had Turkish Delight ice cream. It's exactly as awesome as it sounds. (I had lavendar ice cream yesterday, and it was equally divine.)

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England and a glass of sloe gin and tonic.



* CSI: Canterbury, anyone?
** You know you're Canadian when...
*** Except I don't have a copy of Foucault. So sue me.

No one's kicked me out yet!

I've discovered a wonderful new place to study. I take my handy-dandy membership card and my book, and I go sit in the Chapter House in York Minster. It's calm and quiet,* and there's really something to be said for reading medieval theology in a room constructed 700 years ago.

I sat there for two hours today, until the cold stone got to be a bit much for my keister to handle, and an hour and a half yesterday. I expect I will be making a regular pest of myself.


* Except for the occasional school group, but they don't generally stay long, and often I learn something from the tour guide.

Limbo - I can't go any lower!

More like, I refuse to go any lower. Raise that stupid bamboo pole higher, please!

Okay, enough with the metaphors. I've been having advisory issues. J and N are both wonderful people, but our interests, we have found, are just a tad too far apart.

My interests have always been in religion, and I've always found Church Law interesting, as much as I knew about it. Teenage exposure to catechetical debate matured with my interactions with David and our Berthold/Hermes/Thomas of York* project. Even the incomprehensible Philosophy of the Mind course added to it.

So to me it is rather natural that I be drawn to philosophy, Church law, and pastoral manuals. When I applied to York, I did not realise that the department had very little theological focus. That part is my fault - every grad student should be very aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the schools they apply to. I was drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of York - and medieval disability studies practically defines "interdisciplinary."

So today I met with P, who is both a wonderful fellow and quite knowledgeable about the things I need to learn. We need to have another meeting - one with J and N, most likely - and try and sort this out. In the meantime, I will be busily proving myself as a worthy student for P to supervise, as he is understandably leery about just accepting someone "off the street," so to speak.

So I'm still in limbo, which is not exactly a fun place to be. Hopefully we can sort this out. I hope that as we branch out into into a widely-accepted (or at least widely-known) discipline, fewer students of medieval disability will feel this misfit syndrome.

I hazard the guess that students of medieval disability have an extra struggle for acceptability. Those who come to the field later on, as established (or at least accredited) scholars only have to worry about publishers and peer-reviews. Negativity on those fronts can be damaging, but it likely won't derail an entire career. As students, our advisors aren't familiar with our background, goals, or methods, because they aren't disability scholars themselves, and they really haven't even encountered much in the way of literature. And that's nobody's fault - it's just a factor of an emerging discipline. But they are responsible for our degrees, and we need to struggle extra to make ourselves comprehensible. As more of us fight our ways through and become available to mentor or supervise our own students, I hope it will change. If there are any professors in the field reading this, I tip my hat to you. It's because of you that this isn't harder still - keep up the good work.


* Hey, guess what? I'm in York! It really doesn't lose its thrill.

It figures.

I'm off to return some library books today, but due to some post-travel confusion I found myself hungry and having a free hour on my hands. So I went down to Subway (very nice staff, and the best breakfast value hands down), and I decided while I was sitting there with my free tea I would look at the library books I was about to return.

Barbara Swain's Fools and Folly was about what I would expect for a book published in 1932, and does have a number of interesting sources in the endnotes. I especially appreciate the citations from the Patrologia Latina, because that is not a beast I want to just start wading through. Nevertheless, the book suffers from the classic "disability = sin" problem, and it seems to me that Swain got the causal relationship backwards: one is not declared a heretic or sinner because one is seen to be a fool, one is a fool because one is a sinner. I.e., only an idiot (in our modern figurative sense) would act contrary to God's Law. I think this usage of the word "fool" is indeed highly figurative. She also discusses the Ship of Fools and the Feast of Fools, generalising quite a lot from a small handful of sources.

The other book, Ronald Finucane's Miracles and Pilgrims is quite excellent, and I sincerely wish I didn't have to give it back to the library today. He addresses the issue of the plurality of the medieval church, and that the small little parish of St. Margaret in Little Tiny Village is not the same Church as the Vatican. Catholicism has never been completely "top down", despite the importance of the hierarchy. There is an element of "bottom up" as well, and a great many people somewhere in the middle. This "middle Church" is where I find myself the most intrigued when it comes to disability.

There are important "top down" texts which treat with disability (Gratian's Decretals, for example, or the Fourth Lateran Council); and there are the "bottom up" parish rolls which recorded the active life of a particular religious community; and then there are the "middle" texts of the penitentials, which draw on Church Law, academic philosophy influenced by Plato, Aristotle, and Muslim philosophers, and the practical concerns of pastoral work. Perhaps that is why I am so interested in them. They're the middle ground of the discussion. I think I am going to cut this off here, because I want to develop these ideas further before committing them to the public space.

It figures (to go back to the title) that I would have these awesome thoughts the day I go to return the book. Hello, photocopier!

Meanwhile, I am now actually employed, and I have my first real shift on Saturday! Go me!

Also, watch this space for exciting news* in the world of Alison's academic career!

* YMMV.

Kalamazoo Round-up, Day 1!

I slept in.

The book sales start at 8am Thursday morning, and since I did not intend to buy much this year (AHAHAhahaha...) I decided not to get up and fight my may through the crowds of people angling for the display-copy discounts. At 10am, though, I headed off to my first session, (Ab)normal Societies, which was pretty good. Before this, I had never seen a lecture delivered via sign language, and watching how that worked was pretty cool (though I felt bad for the interpreters who didn't know the Latin terms we were throwing around). I'm glad I was actually paying attention to the presider when she introduced the first speaker, because I heard her say he was going to be attending the University of York soon. Hey, that's my school! I am usually very quiet during Q&A, because I am shy, but afterwards I introduced myself to the speaker, Greg (who I have already introduced to you), and to another scholar in the audience. (We had a nice discussion of insanity and Judaism, and I'm eagerly awaiting translation of his book, because it sounds fascinating.)

Lunch was all kinds of fail. The vegetarian entree was half of a strawberry-nut-maple wrap, and even though I was annoyed that they were serving me dessert and not a proper meal, I made sad eyes at the serving lady and she snuck me another half. The soup was good, though. Somewhere around lunch time, I was making my way around the book rooms, when David came running up to me with a copy of Sandra Billington's A Social History of the Fool: "Alison, look what I found! There was only one, and I grabbed it right away! Here! I'm not telling you how much it cost, and anyway I get reimbursed by the university."* This is why he is called Excellent David.

After lunch we went to an awesome presentation on catapults, put on by three high school students and their teacher. They had spent the past two years researching and constructing a miniature medieval catapult. I have to say, those kids had guts. They were presenting to a roomful of the people whose books they'd used as research. And even though it was obvious they didn't know how to pronounce all the words they used (tree-tises and tray-buckets), they used them correctly. I was already feeling pretty exhausted, so partway through, I left and had a nap. I'm told that the rest of the presentation was just as good, and by the end everyone was trading tips and problem-solving back and forth.

I slept through the next session, too. It had been a busy week, I guess.

I made it back downstairs in time for the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages. We are reaching critical mass, people. Medieval disability studies is beginning to organise itself and by next year's k'zoo, we will be out there kicking down doors and demanding to be considered a legitimate field of our own. It was very refreshing, being in a room full of scholars who cared about the same thing. Validation is a marvellous thing.

Dinner was better than lunch, I think.

After dinner, I am sure I went to a session, but it slips my mind. Then it was time for the open bars - and the Congress specialises in open bars. If you want to, you can drink for free from about 5pm until the booze runs out at 10 or 11. The University of Toronto's reception is especially popular, and it was there that I ran into Greg again - and this time, we had a long and hilarious discussion. Rachel, the scholar who had organised the session that morning, helped to translate for us, but it got difficult as we got drunker and more voices joined in. Still, she did an admirable job, and I think the highlight for me was trying to explain Screech and its customs.

At some point I wandered off to ask David if we were going to be playing Latin Scrabble that night (so I could invite Greg and Rachel, if they wished), but I got waylaid by an interesting discussion with a scholar from Saskatchewan and by the time I made it to David, almost everyone else had gone to bed.

We still played Latin Scrabble, though, and I kicked everyone's butts. We discovered the next morning that I had actually won the Wednesday night game as well, on a technicality because I went out first. But then I went to bed.

* Why won't someone reimburse me for my book purchases? Sigh. I suppose I have to get a degree and a job, first.

End/Beginning of Term

Tomorrow marks the end of Week 1 of the summer term here at York. This week and next week feature no classes, but all the exams from the previous term. I'm not sure why they don't do them right after term, when it's all fresh. Either way, I wrote my palaeography exam today (because I promised I would), and I think that's the last exam for me. I have more fun studying to research than to take an exam.

However, this means I can now set up another advisory meeting, and I'm not feeling too bad about it. I should have ~4,000 words to say about St. Katherine of Alexandria, ~3,000 words to say about the vocabulary of foolishness in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin, a lecture abstract about Margery Kempe submitted to an upcoming conference, and newly-revised arguments about why I want to move away from literary studies. I'd like to think that's not too shabby.

I will probably make a visit to the library in Toronto one day while I'm home, since it's orders of magnitude bigger than the library at York. I may be on vacation, but I owe it to myself not to pass up the opportunity.

Kalamazoo is fast approaching, and I'm as excited as ever. I do hope Irina Metzler's book on medieval disability can be ordered from Routledge at the conference discount, but we'll just have to see.

Philosophia siue sapientia?

Today I'm sitting down to write my abstract for my Margery Kempe paper. All I have to do is bang out 200 words of what I plan to write, and then I can forget her for a month or two. Longer, if I decide to go with the long-established custom of writing a paper the week before it's due to be presented.

I'm also starting to assemble my thoughts on St Katherine of Alexandria, of whom a half-dozen vitae were written in late Medieval England. She was pretty popular, and remarkable for passages where she asserts her right to rule in her own right. Relevant to me, she gets into an argument with Emperor Maxentius, who waxes "wroth and wod" several times. The language used to describe Katherine's wisdom and the emperor's great anger is very interesting.

In the Legenda Aurea version, there is a fascinating digression on the types of wisdom and how they all apply to Katherine. It's almost Scholastic in tone and the way is neatly divides and categorises the species. All of a sudden, I feel the need to consult with David, and I'm blessing the times in the past we've talked about Scholastic philosophy, and also the Book of Twenty-Four Philosophers, which this passage also reminds me of.

It's strange. As much as I despise doing philosophy, I'm absolutely drawn to it in contexts like this. I'm far more interested in what this passage is doing here than I am by the rest of the story. Given the context of 13th century English hagiography, what the heck is "Philosophia enim siue sapientia diuiduntur in theoricam, praticam et logicam" doing in a life of an early-Church martyr? Why? Now I'm actually excited to have read these stupid vitae.

And finally, I'm a couple days late on this one, but check out this strip from the awesome comic Get Medieval. It's totally about my research! Woo!

Another crazy thing about this country, and Researchy Stuff

Britain has yet to discover warm water. They've got "hot" down pat, and they've mastered "cold" as well. The revolutionary idea of combining the two is still undeveloped. Sinks (and tubs) have a hot spout and a cold spout. Rare is the sink that has but a single spout, from which pours forth wonderful warm water.

In regards to school, I am still working with Margery, and I'm rather annoyed that I will need to read such a wide range of material on her in order to effectively make a point. Everything from the political situation in Lynn in the early fifteenth century to gender relations and the larger milieu of female mysticism.

Today I hearkened way, way back to 4th grade or so, and started making a tally sheet. I am tallying the references to individual works and authors in the mentally-related entries in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin. A chart! David would be pleased. I can even make it fancier and combine it with my Middle English references. (Some of the entries are from Anglo-Saxon/Latin glossaries and point me to further, older, vocabulary!) And then, I can arrange them according to genre.

Charts make me feel like I'm doing something more concrete than just theory-work.

Maybe that's why David likes them so much. You can't argue with a good chart.

Another thing I really like about the Dictionary of Medieval Latin is that it draws on a wider range of genres: the literary sources are balanced by historical and theological sources.

However, I'm finding the actual definitions kind of irritating. Most of the entries gloss a morphological variant of "fool" - but the whole point of what I am doing is to try to figure out what that actually means. And I got a kick out of the glossing of fatuosus and fatuus with "lunatic." "Mad" would be a decent translation for some of the listed sources, but "lunatic" is just plain silly. "Lunatic" refers to a cyclical (generally monthly) madness, not just any madness at all. Sloppy. Tsk.

Life goes well, and now I go back to practicing Latin for the exam in April. :) Cheers!

Arrogant Frog

I fear becoming a theorist. At this stage in the game, anyone involved in medieval disability studies is working on developing theory, but I really don't want to turn into Michel Foucault. Or anyone like him.

Maybe that's why I don't want to study Margery overmuch. She wrote a book, and that's about all we know. Any theory done based on Margery will always only ever remain theory. And I'm not enthralled about that.

I want to do more than that, be more than that. Critical theory is essential but if all it remains is theory, we all end up like Foucault.

And no one wants to end up like Foucault.

Lexicology

I'm beginning to wrest some sense out of this lexicology work I've been doing. This is good, because I was beginning to dread it. Now the cogs in my mind are working and I am beginning to listen to the words and what they are conveying. I am finding things that interest me, and I'm excited to wake up tomorrow and get back at it.

Words are fun. Reading the dictionary can be a stimulating and profitable enterprise, if you approach it right.

Why Am I Reading the Middle English Dictionary?

That's a good question. And I'm decompressing (a wonderful participle I picked up from a book about sailing ships in space!) from my advisory meeting, so I figure I'll write a whole post.

I'm researching the history of disability, specifically in the high to late Middle Ages. England is a good little record-keeping nation, so there's lots to read, but not everything was written in Latin (heu!). On the continent there are other resources, but those would necessitate learning, say, Old French or some other bastard Latin-wannabe language. Not that it wouldn't be cool (show of hands, everyone whose second language is technically dead?), but I have a list of more important languages I need to learn as well, and time is limited. As irritating as Middle English is, it's still closer to my mother tongue than, say, Occitan. So, Middle English it is, at least for the time being.

I'm just starting out on this whole dissertation thing, which means I'm still checking out possible sources and lines of thought. When you have a concept or a field that's still rather unstudied, it gets confusing. Feminist studies? They know what they're doing, and there are tropes and methodologies and authoritative scholars. Same for history of science folks. And magic scholars. All those little fields have had at least a few decades to mature and develop. History of disability? Well, there's a handful of us. People are starting to publish. There're a few secondary sources.

All this makes it difficult to simply pin down who and what we're talking about. One of the ways I can narrow my field is to look in the dictionary. What words were people using to describe or label the physical conditions I'm curious about? What other contexts to they appear in? If a word has 5 possible meanings, are any of them related in a conceptual way? And in which genres of literature do my words of interest appear? There's a lot of questions there, and if I knew more about lexicography I'd have a better idea how to answer them.

My advisory meeting today went okay. It was revealed that no, I do not have much familiarity with Middle English. I think my advisors realised that I'm feeling a little overwhelmed with the enormous list of things that I need to explore, and that I need to focus on just a handful of things at a time. Otherwise I'll just sit there surrounded by a mass of books looking bewildered. I've got a short list of things to do before the next meeting. I hope my search for secondary sources will be more fruitful this year than it was last year.

Oh, and there is also potential for presenting at Kalamazoo next year, through one of the groups my advisory heads. Cool beans, though it might be a bit of a stretch for me to fit under the umbrella.

(Plus, guys, it's really cool that I'm starting to see random people wander their way over to my blog. Woot.)

Inadequacy

I have a meeting in the morning with my supervisors. My notes for this meeting are roughly four and a half single-spaced pages, and I feel that's not half enough. I wonder if I'm going to spend the next three years feeling like that. I feel like I didn't accomplish nearly enough in the two weeks since we met last. I want to be a good student. I want to make my supervisors think they made the right choice by accepting me. I hope I can manage that somehow.

I've spent the past two weeks with my head buried in a dictionary, and it was such a relief tonight to just sit down and translate some Latin. I don't like Middle English very much, for the record. It's a sloppy language.

I wish I had more of a linguistics background, specifically lexicology. It would be easier to describe what I found in the dictionaries if I knew the proper terms for different kinds of nouns or different uses of adjectives. I'm really glad I know as much as I do. Knowledge is never wasted, folks, even from those courses you take just for the heck of it.

BOOK LOVE!

Today someone mentioned asking for a Lewis and Short* for Christmas. That made me think to check abebooks.com and alibris.com to see if any were available and what the asking price was. abe had nothing. Alibris had a copy for $40.

$40.

This book normally sells upwards of $250. Used, you're lucky to find it at $150.

Naturally, I bought it on the spot. This sort of book is an invaluable tool, a career investment.

I own a Lewis and Short!


* The ultimate Latin dictionary, for those not familiar.

Research adjustment

Being a "research student" is something of an adjustment. On the whole, I enjoy it a lot, though there's something comforting and familiar about classwork.

I am responsible to myself. I have to keep myself organised and motivated. On days when I don't feel like doing much, I still need to push myself. I also have to direct myself as to what to do. Do I look at this? Read that? What's most important? It's interesting, to be sure. Last week was a little slack and confusing, but I have a game plan for next week, which will help.

I like the general lack of pressure.

It's strange, having advisors. When I worked with David, I knew him well enough that I was comfortable just asking random questions and learning from him. I still am, and I still do. It's weird trying to form that sort of relationship now by necessity. Yes, I can ask questions when I feel in a jam, that's what they're there for.

I've got a lot I can learn from them about how to do research for this sort of massive project, where you have to be able to account for just about everything and anything marginally related. You might not write about it, but you have to know about it, in case someone asks.

Oh, and I'm not the only one to want to throw Piers Plowman against the wall in a bewildered rage. I'm comforted to know that.